Excerpt

Dick & Ronnie & God & Gorby

Bad joke after bad joke. A bizarre attempt to help Gorbachev get religion. A clandestine meeting with a stubborn Nixon. A cry for help from an exasperated Gorbachev: “He’s blathering on again!” Newly declassified documents from American and Soviet archives provide a look behind the scenes at the Reagan-Gorbachev summit talks and the events around them—and show Ronald Reagan to be both shrewder than we imagined and more hapless than we dared to think.

A hale and coatless Ronald Reagan greets a bundled-up Mikhail Gorbachev at their first summit meeting, in Geneva, November 1985. By Alain Nogues/Corbis Sygma.

Late in the afternoon of April 27, 1987, a secret visitor was smuggled into the White House. A helicopter swooped low and onto the landing pad. At the Diplomatic Entrance, Chief of Staff Howard Baker and National-Security Adviser Frank Carlucci greeted former president Richard Nixon. They escorted Nixon inside and up a private elevator to the second floor, the residence quarters of the White House, now occupied by Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Nixon had not set foot in the residence since August 9, 1974, the day he resigned from the presidency.

Reagan and Nixon had known each other for years. After Reagan entered the White House, Nixon would send him occasional private notes, often flattering and unctuous. “Pat and my reactions were the same: ‘Thank God for Ronald Reagan,’” Nixon wrote in early 1981, after Reagan had granted a pardon to Mark Felt, the former associate director of the F.B.I., who had been convicted of approving illegal break-ins for surveillance. (Nixon did not know at the time that Felt had been Deep Throat, an agent of Nixon’s downfall.) At the end of 1981, Nixon wrote Reagan a note saying, “I like and admire [Poland’s Lech] Walesa, but in my book, Time missed the boat: President Reagan should have been Man of the Year.”

Now Nixon was back. His eyes scanned the living quarters, recording the changes with his characteristic blend of calculation and resentment. The Reagans, never known for parsimony, had given the place a sense of opulence. “I would not have recognized it because of the luxurious furnishings and decorating,” wrote Nixon a few hours later in a lengthy memo for his own files, described here for the first time. “As I looked up and down the hall, I would estimate that at least $2 million, rather than the $1 million that has been reported in the press, had been expended for this purpose.” By contrast, Nixon reflected to himself, his wife, Pat, had spent the sums she had raised for redecorating the White House on the public spaces on the first floor, such as the dining rooms and ballroom.

Reagan, dressed in a brown suit, was waiting for Nixon behind a desk in an upstairs study filled with pictures and mementos. Nixon remembered this particular room all too well. It had once been a bedroom, the one where Nixon had slept as president. As he sat down next to Reagan, and Baker and Carlucci settled into chairs across from them, Nixon tried to lighten the mood by launching into the story of when he had first been in that room. In 1966, when Nixon, out of office, was in town for the annual Gridiron Dinner, President Lyndon Johnson invited him to drop by the White House afterward. To Nixon’s astonishment, he was ushered upstairs to this very room, a bedroom even then. Johnson chose to chat with him from atop the bed, while Lady Bird Johnson nestled under the covers. Three years later, when the Nixons moved into the White House, he had discovered there were wires under that bed—wires, that is, to make tape recordings.

Reagan laughed at the story and its irony. The White House taping system, of course, was what had eventually led to Nixon’s resignation.

Returning from his reverie to the situation at hand, Nixon said that Carlucci could take written notes of the meeting if he wanted, and then added by way of a joke, “I assume that the place isn’t taped.” Reagan asked Nixon if he’d like a drink. Nixon, who’d enjoyed his share of cocktails in the White House, might have liked one, but decided that Reagan’s offer seemed a bit late and perfunctory. He declined.

This was not to be a social occasion. Reagan and his top aides had invited Nixon to this clandestine White House meeting to talk about the Soviet Union. They wanted Nixon’s endorsement of ambitious new steps Reagan was preparing to take with Soviet Communist Party secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev, steps that were aimed at easing the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. In the end, Nixon wasn’t going to give Reagan what he wanted.

Over the past decade, a raft of documents—including notes of summit-meeting conversations and internal White House disputes over Soviet policy—have been declassified. The minutes of Soviet politburo sessions have been made public. New Reagan correspondence has also been brought to light. And many former officials have given oral-history interviews for the record. All of this, in conjunction with new interviews conducted with many of the principals, offers an intimate picture of Reagan and his thinking in the waning years of the Cold War. They reveal that, in his second term in the White House, Ronald Reagan’s views and policies were generally at variance with his image as a truculent Cold Warrior. Indeed, during the final three years of his presidency, Reagan was usually among the doves in the often contentious debates about the Soviet Union. Reagan sensed, well before most others in Washington did, that Mikhail Gorbachev might represent something truly new. At the same time, he continued to exhibit the sometimes naïve and even outlandish behavior that has long been the stuff of Reagan lore.

A Clash of Stereotypes

Reagan and Gorbachev had met each other in Geneva in November 1985—the first superpower summit between American and Soviet leaders in more than six years. (“They keep dying on me,” Reagan once explained when asked why he hadn’t met face-to-face with his Soviet counterparts.) When Reagan emerged outside, coatless and hatless in the frosty weather for his initial meeting with the Soviet leader, commentators took it as a sign of Reagan’s vitality. Years later, Reagan’s personal aide, Jim Kuhn, admitted that Reagan had actually put on an overcoat and scarf, and that Kuhn had urged him to take it off for appearance’s sake. After several pleas, Reagan, clearly annoyed, pulled off the overcoat and threw it at Kuhn. “All right, damn it, have it your way,” Reagan said. He went out to greet Gorbachev, who was bundled up in a dark overcoat and scarf and was carrying a fedora.

The two leaders reached no far-reaching accords at Geneva. They did agree to a joint statement saying that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” During the meetings, Gorbachev repeatedly voiced strong opposition to Reagan’s proposed missile-defense system, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, but Reagan refused to give ground. It was a summit in which the two leaders became acquainted with one another, taking each other’s measure. Each leader was dubious about the other, yet each came away thinking about the possibilities for some solid deals in the future. They agreed to two further meetings over the following years, in Washington and Moscow.

Reagan recorded his initial impressions of Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, in a private letter to his old friend George Murphy, another former actor, who had eventually become a conservative Republican senator from California. “He is a firm believer in their system (so is she), and he believes the propaganda they peddle about us,” Reagan wrote. “At the same time, he is practical and knows his economy is a basket case. I think our job is to show him he and they will be better off if we make some practical agreements, without attempting to convert him to our way of thinking.” For his own part, Gorbachev told others he had found Reagan to be “so loaded with stereotypes that it was difficult for him to accept reason.” Yet Gorbachev concluded that Reagan wanted to improve relations with the Soviet Union and that there was a chance for progress on important issues.

Two months later, Gorbachev unveiled a sweeping proposal for a nuclear-free world by the year 2000. His highly publicized initiative appeared on Tass, the Soviet news service, within hours after it was sent to the White House, and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin later admitted, “It would not be honest to deny that Gorbachev’s proclamation carried elements of propaganda.” Most U.S. officials favored simply rejecting the idea outright, but Reagan personally intervened to insist upon a positive response.

Talking strategy at the Reykjavik summit, October 1986. From left: Chief of Staff Donald Regan; the president; Secretary of State George Shultz; and National-Security Adviser John Poindexter. From Bettmann/Corbis.

Gorbachev’s initiative derived from an intensified determination to change the direction of his country’s foreign policy, in particular by pushing for arms control. In August 1986, while Gorbachev was on vacation in the Crimea, the foreign ministry sent him the draft of a letter to Reagan that reflected the Soviet government’s standard positions. After reading the paper, Gorbachev termed it “simply crap.” He wanted to speed things up, and ordered his aides to propose that Reagan meet him relatively soon in London or Reykjavik.

Reagan and Gorbachev sat down in Iceland on October 11 and 12, 1986, for what turned out to be one of the most tumultuous summits of the entire Cold War. Reagan flew into the meeting against a backdrop of the usual admonitions in the United States that Gorbachev represented nothing new for Soviet foreign policy. “He was a protégé of Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, and Mikhail Suslov, then chief party ideologue,” wrote Henry Kissinger. “Neither of these men was likely to have been a closet dove.” In Reykjavik, however, Gorbachev departed from the Soviet past by offering a startling package of proposals on arms control; these represented a series of concessions toward the American positions. Gorbachev suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union cut by half their strategic weapons, including heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles. He also proposed that the two countries eliminate all their intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, and the rest of the American team grew increasingly excited. By the second day, the two sides were trying to iron out the details. Reagan and Gorbachev began talking about going even further, toward eliminating all ballistic missiles or possibly all nuclear weapons. “It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons,” Reagan said. “We can do that,” replied Gorbachev. Yet it finally became clear that all of Gorbachev’s proposals, from beginning to end, came with a condition: that the United States accept severe limits on the development of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, confining all research to laboratories. It was a condition Reagan was unwilling to accept. At the end of the second day, after coming tantalizingly close to the most far-reaching arms-control agreements in the history of the Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev walked out of the Reykjavik summit with no deal at all.

Reagan left the meeting both angry and upset. “I’d just never seen Ronald Reagan that way before, had never seen him with such a look,” said Kuhn. “He wasn’t certain that he had done the right thing by saying that we had to have S.D.I. in return, instead of giving it up in return for eliminating all nuclear missiles.”

At the time, Reykjavik was widely perceived as a failure. In retrospect, it was a turning point. Each side had seen how far the other was willing to go. Declassified documents show that, soon after Reykjavik, Reagan attempted to galvanize the U.S. government to begin thinking about what the abolition of ballistic missiles would mean and how it could be accomplished. Reykjavik also seemed to alter the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev. In the immediate aftermath, Gorbachev claimed to be irked. As described in official minutes, he told the politburo two days after the summit had ended that Reagan had “exhibited extreme primitivism, a caveman outlook, and intellectual impotence.” Yet such remarks seemed to be tailored for the consumption of Communist Party hard-liners. Whatever annoyance he felt soon passed, and Gorbachev began to see Reagan in a different light. Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign-policy adviser, wrote in a memoir that, at Reykjavik, Gorbachev “became convinced it would ‘work out’ between him and Reagan.… After Reykjavik, he never again spoke about Reagan in his inner circle as he had before.… Never again did I hear statements such as, ‘The U.S. administration is political scum that is liable to do anything.’”

“We Just Don’t Agree”

By the time of Nixon’s clandestine visit to the White House, Reagan and his top aides, including Shultz and the chief of staff, Howard Baker, were incensed—not at the Soviets, but at high-level criticism on the home front. Nixon and Kissinger, the architects of détente with the Soviet Union, were now giving credibility, in widely discussed articles, to the argument that Reagan was being seduced by Gorbachev. Frank Carlucci, the national-security adviser, recommended that the president meet, separately, with Nixon and Kissinger. Reagan quickly rejected Kissinger, his principal political target and adversary of the mid-1970s. Nixon, however, was different; Reagan would not say no to a former president.

Once settled into a soft chair alongside Reagan in the White House residence, with Baker and Carlucci looking on, Nixon seized the initiative. He said he realized the administration was unhappy with the public criticism, but he and Kissinger were sincere. The thrust of Nixon’s message was that Reagan should be more hawkish in dealing with Gorbachev. At one point, according to Nixon’s private notes from the session, Nixon told Reagan that a deal with the Soviets would not really help Reagan’s standing with the American public. Polls showed that military action helps a president far more than diplomacy does, Nixon said. “I pointed out that many people felt my popularity had gone up because of my trip to China. In fact, it had improved only slightly. What really sent it up was the bombing and mining of Haiphong.”

Nixon’s broader complaint was that any agreement to remove missiles from Europe would leave the Soviet Union with a large advantage in conventional military forces. Reagan pointed out that in his face-to-face conversations with Gorbachev, the Soviet leader had seemed sincere in his desire to reduce Soviet military power, including conventional forces. Gorbachev had said he didn’t want to continue the unending arms race between the two superpowers. Nixon thought Reagan was naïve to believe Gorbachev. He wrote in his subsequent memo that this part of his conversation with Reagan was “somewhat disturbing.”

Nixon sought to create divisions within the administration by taking direct aim at the secretary of state, who was not present that day. Nixon viewed Shultz as the driving force behind Reagan’s diplomacy with Gorbachev. During the Nixon administration, Shultz had served in three Cabinet-level jobs, but all had been concerned with the economy, not foreign policy. Nixon made it clear he thought Shultz was not up to the job of dealing with the Soviet Union.

“I did get in one shot at Shultz, which I thought was quite effective,” wrote Nixon in the memo for his own files. Nixon had done this by employing his favorite rhetorical device of insisting he was not doing what in fact he was about to do. “I introduced it by saying I didn’t want anyone to get the idea that I had anything against him [Shultz],” Nixon said, recounting the conversation. “I said he had been a great Secretary of the Treasury, a great Secretary of Labor, and a great director of OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and that he did an outstanding job of negotiating with [A.F.L.-C.I.O. chairman George] Meany for a period. But I said that negotiating with Meany was much different from negotiating with Gorbachev.”

Reagan asked Nixon for his opinion of Gorbachev. Nixon responded with skepticism. He “could not have gotten his present position or have retained it unless he wanted to be in a position to neutralize Europe or dominate it by either conventional or nuclear blackmail,” Nixon said.

Reagan defended his proposal to eliminate ballistic missiles. Those were the weapons that worried him, he told Nixon, because “just a finger on the button could set them off.” He confirmed that he and Gorbachev had talked about the idea of getting rid of all nuclear weapons, and made plain he would be happy to do so. “It is clear that Reagan thinks the Reykjavik formula is still a good idea,” Nixon wrote unhappily. Moving to counter the claims about Soviet superiority in conventional arms, Reagan told Nixon that the United States and Western Europe together had “enormous superiority over the Soviet Union, which would mean that any kind of arms race would be one they would lose.”

Twice during the meeting, Reagan probed for a compromise with Nixon, suggesting that their two positions on how to deal with Gorbachev were not too far apart. Nixon wasn’t interested. At another juncture, Baker suggested that Nixon and Kissinger reassure their contacts in the Soviet Union that Americans were united in wanting a deal with Gorbachev. Nixon demurred. “I could see of course what he was driving at, and pointed out that I didn’t think it was a good idea,” he wrote. Trying once more, Baker said it would strengthen the American negotiating position if Kissinger and Nixon made clear that they supported the administration. Nixon rebuffed the overture. “I am afraid we just don’t agree on that point,” he said.

The secret meeting: Ronald Reagan seeks support for his Soviet policies from former president Richard Nixon—and doesn’t get it. Courtesy of Frank Carlucci; fromThe Rebellion of Ronald Reagan.

The meeting of president and ex-president was strikingly lacking in warmth. Reagan “was courteous throughout, but I think I sensed a certain coolness on his part,” wrote Nixon. “I don’t know whether Nancy was in the Residence at the time, but if she was, he did not suggest that she come in and say hello. My guess is that she is probably as teed off as Shultz is.”

Nixon came out of the meeting believing that Reagan looked “far older, more tired, and less vigorous in person than in public.” Moreover, Nixon thought, “Reagan, candidly, did not seem to be on top of the issues—certainly in no way as knowledgeable as Gorbachev, for example, which of course would not be surprising.”

Nixon’s conclusion about the president was damning: “There is no way he can ever be allowed to participate in a private meeting with Gorbachev.”

Did You Hear the One About … ?

But Reagan was determined to do business. He and Shultz had had more firsthand contact with the new Soviet leadership than other Americans had had. They were dealing directly with Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, and this put them in a better position to sense Gorbachev’s eagerness, indeed desperation, for an agreement with the United States that might limit Soviet military expenditures and free up resources for the failing Soviet economy.

Those who were able to meet with Gorbachev a single time, as Nixon had done, tended to view him through the prism of the Cold War, with all its stale imagery of velvet gloves and steel fists. Reagan and Shultz, having met Gorbachev more than once, were able to intuit, however imperfectly, that these clichés didn’t fit. Fritz Ermarth, the Soviet specialist at the National Security Council, was deeply suspicious of Gorbachev’s intentions at the time. Many years later, in an interview, he reflected on why he had been wrong and Reagan and Shultz more accurate. “A lot of Gorbachev’s revolutionary potential—not just his avowed purposes, but these areas of naïveté—were revealed in these one-on-one meetings,” Ermarth said.

In forming his perceptions of the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan also had an informal adviser—a well-dressed, attractive, Russian-speaking, 50-year-old woman whose ideas about what was happening in Moscow and Leningrad made a bigger impression upon the president of the United States than the reporting and analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency. Her name was Suzanne Massie. She was a journalist and author—her book Nicholas and Alexandra, written with her former husband, Robert K. Massie, had been a best-seller—but not an established Soviet scholar. She first met the president in 1984, when National-Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane took her into the Oval Office to give Reagan a report on a recent visit to the Soviet Union. They hit it off immediately.

Reagan gained a number of benefits from his regular meetings with Massie. She was his source of Russian stories and proverbs. It was Massie who introduced to Reagan the Russian phrase he memorized and then repeated again and again, to Mikhail Gorbachev’s considerable annoyance, throughout the summitry and arms-control negotiations of his second term: “Doveryai, no proveryai”—“Trust, but verify.” This was the kind of memorable language that Reagan loved but had trouble obtaining from his official advisers. Indeed, declassified memorandums reveal that the State Department and National Security Council tried repeatedly to re-write one of the most famous lines of the Reagan presidency, his exhortation in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The diplomats insisted that, if he addressed the matter at all, he should say something more anodyne, like “It’s time for the wall to come down.”

Reagan derived from Massie his impressions of the Russian people and their history, as an entity separate from the Soviet government or the Communist Party. When Reagan went to Geneva for his first meeting with Gorbachev, he was carrying Massie’s book Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia. He was reading it so carefully that, in one preparatory session devoted to the coming summit, Reagan interrupted Paul Nitze, his chief arms-control negotiator, to say, “I’m in the year 1830 [in Massie’s book] What happened to all these small shopkeepers in St. Petersburg in the year 1830 and to all that entrepreneurial talent in Russia? How can it have just disappeared?” From time to time Reagan used Massie to deliver back-channel communications to Moscow, and, knowing that she had the president’s ear, Moscow used her for the same purpose.

Reagan obtained the breakthrough he needed for a Washington summit when Gorbachev made a significant concession on arms control in early 1987. In February, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would drop the condition that a deal banning intermediate-range missiles in Europe would have to be part of a larger package. Instead, Gorbachev said, he was willing to go along with a separate agreement on this issue “without delay,” thus setting aside the effort to get Reagan to restrict work on missile defense beforehand. Gorbachev did not wish to wait another two years for a new American president; he needed to ease tensions quickly so that he could proceed with his reforms inside the Soviet Union.

It was Colin Powell’s job, as Carlucci’s successor as the national-security adviser post, to brief Reagan on the issues that would be on the agenda of the Washington summit. Powell realized that Gorbachev would know every nuance of the arms-control negotiations between the two countries, the ranges of various missiles, the history and conflicting interpretations of prior agreements. Reagan would not. “He hated the esoterica of arms control,” recalled Frank Carlucci, Powell’s predecessor, in an interview. “He wasn’t interested in the details. When I sent him a memo, it came back with his initials. It never had any comment.”

In advance of Gorbachev’s arrival, Powell briefed Reagan on several occasions. He discovered that the president was thinking about what was to come, but not in the same way as his advisers. He was preoccupied with the ceremonial and personal aspects of the summit. From California friends, Reagan had obtained two sets of gold cuff links that showed men beating swords into plowshares, the traditional symbol of peace. He was planning to wear one pair and give the other to Gorbachev. “When do you think I ought to give him the cuff links?” Reagan asked his national-security adviser. Powell tried to switch the conversation to what Gorbachev might say about Soviet SS-18 missiles, but Reagan talked about the cuff links again and again. The president left it to his aides, especially Shultz, to negotiate the remaining details of the so-called I.N.F. treaty.

Gorbachev arrived at the White House on the morning of December 8, 1987, for the first of three days of talks. By this time, after the summits in Geneva and Reykjavik, he and Reagan were accustomed to each other’s idiosyncrasies. Gorbachev knew that Reagan would tell anti-Soviet jokes and repeat the same old arguments. Reagan knew that Gorbachev would defend the Soviet system by saying that the United States had problems, too.

The first session was between Reagan and Gorbachev themselves, without any senior officials. Reagan presented Gorbachev with the cuff links. The two men sat in the Oval Office with translators at their backs and American and Soviet notetakers jotting down what the two leaders were saying. After welcoming Gorbachev, Reagan quickly brought up the question of human rights in the Soviet Union. In particular, Reagan wanted to know why Soviet authorities could not lift the continuing restrictions on Jewish emigration.

As Reagan continued to speak, Gorbachev turned to his translator and muttered, “Ohn boltayet yeschchyo” (“He’s blathering on again”). When it was his turn, the Soviet leader pointed out that the United States maintained a well-guarded border with Mexico and had plans to build an extensive system of fences to make sure Mexicans did not cross. As Gorbachev spoke, Reagan looked at the American notetaker, Fritz Ermarth. “He doesn’t get it, does he?” Reagan whispered. Then, turning to the Soviet leader, Reagan countered that there was a difference between a fence designed to keep people out of a country and one to keep them in. The session was relatively brief and testy. At one point, Gorbachev felt compelled to warn Reagan, “Mr. President, you are not a prosecutor and I am not on trial here.”

Getting in synch: Gorbachev and Reagan in the diplomatic reception room of the White House during the Washington summit, 1987. Courtesy of Ronald Reagan Library.

At their next session, Reagan performed so poorly that his own aides were taken aback. He and Gorbachev held afternoon talks in the Cabinet Room of the White House, surrounded by virtually all the American and Soviet officials involved in the summit: Cabinet members, ministers, national-security aides—34 people in all. Gorbachev opened with a broad overview of the situation inside the Soviet Union: what his economic-reform program was trying to do and what he planned. After Gorbachev had spoken for several minutes, Reagan interrupted him to summon forth one of his jokes about life in the Soviet Union: An American professor about to fly from the United States to Moscow finds that his cabdriver to the airport is a student. He asks what the young man wants to do after school. “I haven’t decided yet,” the driver replies. Upon landing in Moscow, the professor discovers that his Russian cabdriver is also a student, and asks the same question. “They haven’t told me yet,” says the Soviet cabdriver.

Reagan recorded in his diary that this large afternoon session was “not nearly as good a meeting as this morning’s.” That was an understatement. After the session broke up, Shultz, Powell, and Baker went back to the Oval Office. “Mr. President, that was a disaster,” the secretary of state told the president. “You can’t just sit there telling jokes.”

On the second day, Reagan recovered. Before meeting Gorbachev, he spent a half-hour going over the talking points the National Security Council staff had drafted for him overnight. Sitting opposite Gorbachev in the Oval Office with Shultz, Powell, and Carlucci at his side, Reagan traced through the American positions. He and Gorbachev talked about how to follow up the treaty banning intermediate-range missiles in Europe with another, sweeping agreement that would cut intercontinental missiles by half. The two leaders continued to disagree over Gorbachev’s desire for limits on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. While most of this discussion was serious, the president also couldn’t resist telling a few more jokes about the Soviet Union.

The centerpiece of the summit was the formal signing of the I.N.F. agreement, a warm and glittery event. But Gorbachev’s activities were not limited to the White House. During his three days in Washington, he hosted receptions at the Soviet Embassy for artists, writers, and scholars; he engaged in some verbal sparring with American publishers, broadcasters, and newspaper editors; he courted American business executives; he sat down for a talk with congressional leaders. At one point, en route from the Soviet Embassy to the White House, Gorbachev ordered his car to stop along Connecticut Avenue. He got out and plunged into the crowds, shaking hands as though he were an American political candidate and, in the process, setting back the White House schedule. “Mrs. Reagan was furious, because here was the president and everybody else in the White House waiting, and Gorbachev was out there doing what he had learned from observing us—working the crowd, controlling the agenda,” recalled Thomas Griscom, the White House communications chief, in an interview.

Gorbachev was covered not merely on American network news shows each night, but throughout the day on cable television (where CNN was then the relatively new, unchallenged source of minute-by-minute news). The images of Gorbachev did not match the stereotypes of an ironfisted Soviet leader. He seemed clearly smarter than Brezhnev and more sophisticated than Khrushchev, the only other Soviet party secretaries to have visited the United States.

Thunder on the Right

The significance of this summit did not lie in the nuances of arms control. Indeed, Reagan and Gorbachev made less headway on those issues in their talks at the White House than they had in Reykjavik the previous year. Rather, the Washington summit was a milestone for its ceremony, symbolism, and public impact. The event dramatized to the American public, in a way that no other event had, that the Cold War might be winding down. American politicians recognized that the public’s response to Gorbachev’s visit was overwhelmingly positive. In all of this, Reagan led the way. He had pushed hard to have a summit with Gorbachev in Washington, recognizing that it would be more than simply another round of high-level diplomacy.

On the day following Gorbachev’s departure, Richard Nixon scrawled another of his occasional notes to Ronald Reagan. The previous night, Reagan had given a televised address to the nation about the summit, and Nixon told the president it was “one of the most eloquent you have ever delivered.”

But then Nixon went on to issue a warning about the summit and its impact: “Just remember, Rome was not built in a day and it takes more than three days to civilize Moscow.”

The note underscored how America’s two veteran anti-Communist politicians had repositioned themselves. Reagan, who had once called the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” had welcomed the Soviet visitors; Nixon, the architect of détente, countered by saying they were still uncivilized. Henry Kissinger was even more negative. In a lengthy, biting column, he denounced the “near rapture” of Gorbachev’s American audiences, the mood of “euphoria” of the state dinner, and the “near ecstasy” of U.S. officials. He refused to take seriously the idea that Gorbachev might be seeking to wind down the Cold War. Above all, Kissinger lamented Reagan’s evident “preoccupation” with getting rid of nuclear weapons. In hindsight, it seems clear that Reagan and Shultz understood Gorbachev better than Nixon and Kissinger did. They intuited more quickly what his leadership of the Soviet Union might mean for American foreign policy.

On the morning of March 11, 1988, Suzanne Massie appeared at the White House to communicate an unusual plea from one of Gorbachev’s top advisers in Moscow directly to Reagan. A memorandum of this conversation lies buried in the archives of the Reagan Library. According to the notes, “Mrs. Massie delivered an oral message to the president that she received in Moscow from Central Committee Secretary Anatoly Dobrynin.”

As Soviet ambassador to Washington for more than a quarter-century, Dobrynin had been the master of back-channel communications between the Soviet leadership and American presidents since John F. Kennedy. Although he had been recalled to Moscow by Gorbachev in 1986, Dobrynin was still a key adviser. He had been part of Gorbachev’s entourage at the summits in Reykjavik and in Washington. Massie said she understood that the message sent by Dobrynin originated “even higher,” meaning Gorbachev himself.

The message was a plaintive one. Soviet officials believe “that the President still thinks of the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ whose social and political positions have placed it on the ‘ash heap of history,’” Massie reported. According to Dobrynin’s message, despite the outpouring of goodwill at the Washington summit, Soviet officials were still worried “that the Administration’s overall perception of Soviet international behavior has not changed.” As a result, Soviet officials had a request, Massie said: if Reagan believed there had been changes in Soviet policy, “then it would be important for the President to state this prior to the Moscow summit. The Soviets ask what concrete steps they could take over the next few months to prompt such a statement by the President.” Soviet officials were, in effect, seeking to bargain for an easing in Reagan’s rhetoric. During the early months of 1988, Gorbachev was especially sensitive to American criticism and eager for a few good words from Reagan. For one thing, he was in the midst of the most dramatic reversal of Soviet foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War: a decision to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Reagan did not immediately make the statement that Gorbachev was looking for, and when he embarked for the scheduled Moscow summit it was unclear whether he ever would.

Ronald Reagan departed for Moscow in May of 1988. He was 77 years old and had scarcely traveled outside the United States for a year. To prepare for the trip, Reagan found it necessary to stop first for four nights of sleep and relaxation in Helsinki. While there, the president and his wife took turns having a massage by a Finnish masseuse that George Shultz had recommended.

As the president approached another summit, his old friends in the conservative movement shuddered. In a pair of columns, George Will acidly portrayed the president as having betrayed the cause of anti-Communism. “Four years ago, many people considered Reagan a keeper of the Cold War flame,” Will wrote. “Time flies.”

No more evil empire? At their final summit meeting, in Moscow in May 1988, Reagan finally told Gorbachev what he wanted to hear. Courtesy of Ronald Reagan Library.

A Come-to-Jesus Moment

On Sunday, May 27, 1988, the president left Helsinki for Moscow. Peering out of the window of Air Force One above Soviet territory, Reagan murmured to Powell, “Look, there’s almost no traffic.” He was accustomed to the cars, houses, and opulence of the United States—the material well-being he had wanted to show Gorbachev during his visit to the United States. After the arrival ceremonies, the president immediately sat down with Gorbachev in the Kremlin for their first talk. At each of their summits, the two men held meetings that were labeled as “one-on-one” sessions, in which Reagan and Gorbachev spoke to each other without the presence of top-level aides. Each brought a translator and two officials to take notes.

The texture of these meetings was qualitatively different from that of the larger ones. They were more informal and less structured, enabling the two leaders to demonstrate their priorities and personalities. It was during the first one-on-one session in Moscow that Reagan engaged in a remarkable and questionable endeavor well beyond his mandate as president of the United States. According to the detailed notes of their meeting, which have now been declassified, Reagan attempted to persuade Gorbachev of the existence of God.

The meeting opened with pleasantries. Both men agreed that they and their countries had come a long way since their first summit, in Geneva, three years earlier. Within minutes, the two men revived their running debate about human rights. Reagan handed Gorbachev a list of names of Soviet citizens he believed were victims of repression in one fashion or another. As in the past, Gorbachev countered by arguing that America could be criticized for its own human-rights abuses, too.

Suddenly, Reagan switched the subject to religion. Throughout his career, Reagan was always more attuned to religious themes than his political aides or foreign-policy advisers. “He believed in Armageddon, a very nervous subject with me,” recalled his longtime political adviser Stuart Spencer. “I argued with him about it, not that I’m an expert on biblical stuff, but I’d just say, ‘That’s kind of scary to be talking about.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, but it’s going to happen.’” In dealing with the Soviet Union, Reagan continued throughout his presidency to raise questions about religion and churches. And he harbored a dream that Gorbachev might be a religious believer. Once, after hearing Gorbachev use the phrase “God bless,” Reagan took note and pointed it out to Colin Powell. “I had to tell the president, ‘Don’t see this as an expression of religious faith,’” Powell recalled in an interview. “It’s almost idiomatic. He’s not ready to get down on his knees for you.”

But Reagan would have none of it. Now, in Moscow, Reagan told Gorbachev that what he was about to say must be considered entirely secret. According to the notes taken during the meeting by the American eyewitnesses, Reagan told Gorbachev that “if word got out that this was even being discussed, the President would deny he had said anything about it.” To emphasize this point, Reagan said again a few minutes later that “if there was anyone in the room who said he had given such advice [to Gorbachev about religion], he would say that person was lying, that he had never said it.”

While preparing for the Moscow summit, Reagan had discussed with his aides the idea of focusing on freedom of religion. He had worked with aides on some talking points to use with the Soviet leader; he had honed these ideas during his stay in Helsinki. Once he was alone with Gorbachev, the president began with a plea for religious tolerance in the Soviet Union. He praised Gorbachev for easing slightly the rules for the Russian Orthodox Church. According to the notes of the meeting, “The President asked Gorbachev what if he ruled that religious freedom was part of the people’s rights, that people of any religion—whether Islam with its mosque, the Jewish faith, Protestants or the Ukrainian Church—could go to the church of their choice.”

Gorbachev deflected this question. He insisted that religion was not a serious problem in the Soviet Union. According to the notes, Gorbachev told Reagan that “he, himself, had been baptized, but he was not now a believer, and that reflected a certain evolution of Soviet society.” There might have been some “excesses” in repressing religion immediately after the Soviet revolution, Gorbachev said, but times had changed. His program of perestroika was designed to expand democratic procedures, and it would extend to religion.

Reagan then ventured further. The president switched from seeking to persuade Gorbachev of the value of religious tolerance to promoting a belief in God. Reagan did so by telling one of his trademark stories. According to the notes of their meeting, “The President said he had a letter from the widow of a young World War II soldier. He was lying in a shell hole at midnight, awaiting an order to attack. He had never been a believer, because he had been told God did not exist. But as he looked up at the stars he voiced a prayer hoping that, if he died in battle, God would accept him. That piece of paper was found on the body of a young Russian soldier who was killed in that battle.”

Gorbachev tried to change the subject. Perhaps the United States and the Soviet Union might open the way for greater cooperation in space, he told the president. But the president wasn’t to be diverted. Reagan told Gorbachev that space was in the direction of heaven, but not as close to heaven as some other things that they had been discussing.

As the meeting ended, Reagan became even more direct and personal. He noted that his own son Ron did not believe in God, either.

“The President concluded that there was one thing he had long yearned to do for his atheist son. He wanted to serve his son the perfect gourmet dinner, to have him enjoy the meal, and then to ask him if he believed there was a cook.”

Of the two American notetakers who were present for this extraordinary conversation, one took Reagan’s effort at face value: “Reagan thought he could convert Gorbachev, or make him see the light,” said Rudolf Perina, who was then the director of Soviet affairs on the National Security Council. The second, Thomas Simons, the deputy assistant secretary of state, viewed Reagan’s promotion of religion as, in part, a tactic to deflect Gorbachev from discussion of other substantive issues.

During the Moscow summit, there were two plenary sessions in which each leader was accompanied by six to eight top officials. At the outset, the two leaders congratulated each other on the completion of the I.N.F. treaty. According to the declassified notes of this meeting, Reagan said he and his aides had “shed a lot of blood” to win approval for the treaty. Gorbachev joked that the 93-to-5 vote for Senate ratification was impressive, but that “the Soviet side had done better—with 100 percent of the votes in favor.” The two sides were still committed to completing during Reagan’s final six months in office a more sweeping treaty covering strategic weapons. But at the summit they repeated old arguments and did little to narrow their differences. At one awkward moment, Reagan, seeking to emphasize a point with a hand gesture, spilled a glass of water onto the table and apologized. “Never mind,” Gorbachev told him. “A careless move with a glass of water is no big deal. If it had happened with missiles … ”

Trying Gorbachev’s Patience

Mikhail Gorbachev went out of his way to let the world know that he and Ronald Reagan liked each other. The relationship served important purposes for his foreign policy and for his personal standing as the Soviet leader. The private reality was more complicated.

Sitting in a meeting with Reagan required patience—sometimes more patience than Gorbachev possessed. Reagan told anecdote after anecdote. He quoted from letters he claimed to have received. He repeated the same phrases and lines over and over again, never going beyond them or explaining their particular relevance to the point at hand. Gorbachev was a debater, a specialist in argument and refutation. Reagan was a storyteller. If he had a debating style at all, it was akin to Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” in boxing: let your opponent throw punches until he is exhausted. After a session with Reagan, interlocutors would often find that they had engaged in pleasant and superficial banter but had achieved nothing. They would be left wondering whether Reagan had cleverly deflected them from their purpose, or whether it had just turned out that way.

Historian Suzanne Massie—who served as a back channel between Reagan and the Soviets—at lunch with the president and Nancy Reagan, 1986. Courtesy of Ronald Reagan Library.

For Gorbachev, this process was exasperating. Rudolf Perina, the official notetaker, described the tenor of the conversations. “In general, Gorbachev thought he was clearly smarter than Reagan. There was an element of condescension,” Perina said in an interview. “Sometimes, when Gorbachev made a clever point, he would look around the room, in the vain hope there would be some audience there to recognize his superior intelligence. But these were one-on-one meetings, and there was no one there but the notetakers, who would avert their eyes and go back to their notes.”

When Reagan arrived at Gorbachev’s Kremlin office for their final one-on-one session, the Soviet leader expressed some apparent uneasiness at the prospect of being left alone once again with the American president. The notes show that as the session started the Soviet leader invited Howard Baker to stay. Baker demurred, saying he would instead wait outside.

Reagan entered bearing a gift. He had brought Gorbachev a denim jacket. It was, he said, an example of the American wardrobe, a gift from a friend in the American West. Gorbachev seems to have been momentarily bewildered. He asked Reagan whether the jacket was the right size (perhaps wondering whether the C.I.A. had somehow been covertly measuring his chest and waist). Reagan said he didn’t know. Gorbachev tactfully called the jacket “a marvelous souvenir. This was one he would keep at home.”

By now, Gorbachev was prepared to deal with Reagan on Reagan’s own terms. The Soviet leader escorted the president over to his desk and displayed some of the letters he said he had been receiving. He read excerpts from the letters; Gorbechev was imitating Reagan’s own style. Here was a letter from the city of Grodno, in Belorussia, by a man who had named his son Ronald and wanted the American president to be the godfather, Gorbachev reported. Here was another letter from someone in Togliatti, on the Volga, who had just named his newborn daughter Nancy in honor of the president’s wife. And here was another from Ivanovo, in the Ukraine, from a woman who urged Reagan and Gorbachev to eliminate all nuclear weapons.

This time, it was Reagan’s turn to switch the conversation back to substantive issues. He said he had read Gorbachev’s book Perestroika and asked the Soviet leader what steps he would be taking next. Gorbachev gave an overview of the political reforms he expected to put forward at the party conference a few weeks later.

It was not long before Reagan was telling stories again. This time, the Soviet leader could not hide his irritation. Reagan said there were examples in the United States of the kinds of economic opportunities that Gorbachev was trying to achieve with perestroika. Why, said Reagan, he had met an American woman, a professional pianist, who had developed arthritis and could no longer play. She was at home with nothing to do. Her aunt reminded her that she baked the best brownies anyone had ever tasted. (Here, one of Reagan’s notetakers, Thomas Simons, had to explain to the Russian interpreter that brownies were small, square chocolate cakes.) The woman began selling her brownies to grocery stores.

“That was three or four years ago … ,” Reagan went on. But before he could complete his story, Gorbachev interrupted. “I predict that she now has a prosperous business,” he said sarcastically, knowing exactly where Reagan’s anecdotes were invariably headed. Exactly right, Reagan said: the woman now employed more than 35 people, sold her products to airlines and restaurants, and earned more than $1 million a year.

Nevertheless, the tone of cordiality prevailed. The meeting was confined largely to generalities, but Reagan placed himself squarely on the side of those who wanted to improve relations with the Soviet Union. He told Gorbachev that he observed “one simple rule: you don’t get in trouble by talking to each other, and not just about each other.” Gorbachev complained that some people in America asked, “Why help the Soviet Union expand? Wouldn’t it be better for it to be weak?” Reagan replied that he did not feel that way at all. Let us keep on building trust with one another, he said.

Good-bye to the Evil Empire

What followed, as it turned out, was the principal event of the summit.

After their talk, the two leaders strolled out of the Kremlin onto Red Square. They stopped to talk with small groups of people. Picking up a small boy in his arms, Gorbachev said, “Shake hands with Grandfather Reagan.” As the two men were walking back toward the Kremlin, Reagan was confronted with the same question he had been asked repeatedly over the past couple of years. A reporter brought up Reagan’s famous epithet about the Soviet Union five years earlier: “Do you still think you’re in an evil empire, Mr. President?”

Reagan didn’t hesitate. “No,” he answered. “I was talking about another time and another era.”

The reply appeared to be casual and spontaneous. Yet this was, in fact, precisely the issue that had been under discussion between Moscow and Washington at least since the previous March, when Dobrynin sent his plea to Reagan. A day later, at a press conference just before leaving Moscow, Reagan made the same point again and elaborated further, this time emphasizing Gorbachev’s personal role. Asked what had changed in the half-decade since he had branded the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Reagan replied, “I think that a great deal of it is due to the general secretary, who I have found different than previous Soviet leaders.” There had been a “profound change” in the Soviet government, Reagan said, and while there were fundamental differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, these differences “continue to recede.”

For Gorbachev, the timing of Reagan’s words could not have been better. The Soviet leader was just weeks away from the special party conference at which he would push for further political changes, including greater openness in the press and new limits on the power of the Communist Party. Once again, reformers within the party would do battle with conservative forces. Eventually, over the following years, the reformers would move beyond Gorbachev. But during this crucial period, Reagan was helping to strengthen Gorbachev’s hand, giving him the time and breathing room he needed to open up the Soviet political system.

Reagan’s words were not merely for public consumption. Upon returning to Washington, he offered essentially the same positive views of the Soviet Union to conservative friends. Responding to a letter from George Murphy, Reagan wrote a few weeks after his visit to Moscow: “Murph, for the first time, I believe there could be a stirring of the people that would make the bureaucrats pay attention.… If glasnost was just showboating, they may have to keep at least some of the promises, or face a public they’ve never seen before.”

It seems unlikely that Reagan, in such a short and carefully restricted trip, had sufficient basis for such broad conclusions about the changes in the Soviet Union. But there could be no denying the political impact of his words or his judgments about Gorbachev.